Developer's Guide to Web Application Security

Digital Signatures

Java contains classes in the java.security package that allow digital signatures to

appear with your message or code. Digital signatures are a step above message digests

in that using them states with certainty the identity of the sender, and indicate

whether the message was modified since being sent.You might wonder why you

would even bother with message digests in the first place if digital signatures offer

these improvements.The tradeoff with digital signatures is that there are many more

steps to follow, they increase the amount of data to be sent, and it is difficult to make

the process invisible to the user. In comparison, message ...